Oliver Stone’s tripped-out, violent escapade, Natural Born Killers turns 20 years old today. If you haven’t seen it in 20 years, Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory Knox (Juliette Lewis) are bandit killers traveling cross-country along Route 666. At the fault of the media, they become instant cult heroes much like Bonnie and Clyde. Everything is going great for the couple until Mickey accidentally kills an innocent Indian man who did nothing but help them on their journey.

Originally threatened with an NC-17 rating from the MPAA, Stone had to cut a few minutes of violence so his film could open in wide release. That didn’t make the film less controversial, as its violent nature was blamed for all kinds of crime in the mid-’90s. Did it merit its original NC-17 rating? Would a stronger rating have changed the outcome of copycat incidents? Let’s revisit Stone’s violent satire and decide whether the controversy still holds up.

2:00: Juliette Lewis had it going on back in the day. Also, if you don’t want to attract strange men in diners, don’t dance provocatively in front of the jukebox. It’s hard to believe right before this movie she played demure Becky in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

9:00: Natural Born Killers is an overdramatized version of what every experimental ’90s film strove to be — outlandishly weird, hyper-violent, dark but funny, with a badass soundtrack, all wrapped in homages to films that inspired them in the first place. In this case, a reference to Bonnie and Clyde.

10:30: COMPLETELY FORGOT RODNEY DANGERFIELD IS IN THIS. Playing a creepy molester.

14:50: Mind you, during this whole sentimental moment, she’s giving him a hand job. How charming.

21:30: It must have sucked to be really high when you first saw this. It would have quickly become a horror film. Though this is definitely something you can’t see just once. There’s so much that happens in the two-hour running-time, seeing it once doesn’t do it justice.

23:00: Robert Downey, Jr.’s mullet in this movie = everything. He shaves it about half-way through. I’m not sure if this hair is ever explained. Downey, Jr. plays Wayne Gale, based on real-life New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy, who was a Current Affair reporter.

33:40: And the award for most explicit daddy issues scene goes to…

1:02:00: Tommy Lee Jones is too good in this. Those mutton chops, that mustache, the pinky ring, that accent — so much swagger at once.

1:11:30: During pre-production of Natural Born Killers, the OJ Simpson case, the Menendez brothers’ arrest, and the Rodney King case were all happening around the same time. Stone believed that the media had an enormous amount of responsibility in the outcome of each of these cases, so criticizing media in an overdramatized manner is a major theme, a drastic change from Quentin Tarantino‘s original script.

1:21:21: Coca-Cola apparently agreed to the use of their polar bear advertisement without knowing what the film was about. After the film was released, Coco-Cola had a bone to pick with Stone.

1:25:30 “I used to be you, then I evolved. From where you’re standing, you’re a man. From where I’m standing, you’re an ape. You’re not even an ape. You’re a media person. Media’s like the weather, only it’s man-made weather. Murder? It’s pure. You’re the one made it impure. You’re buying and selling fear. You say, ‘why?’ I say, ‘why bother?'” Mickey Knox skewers Wayne Gale and, by proxy, the media at large.

Final Thoughts: Unlike its toned-down, classier predecessor Bonnie and Clyde, Natural Born Killers had a fairly happy ending. Mickey and Mallory made a joke of the system — the media — that was so desperately trying to label and bank off of them. The film was blamed for sparking copycat incidents after its release, and the ways in which media portrayed the criminals involved in the real-life cases is similar to the mocking of coverage in the film.